Category: philosophy

Have You Seen This Dead God?

Lately it seems I cannot turn around without coming across the dead God.  I have been reading Zizek again and instead of simply being playfully amused by his counter-intuitive insights I have begun to see more clearly his hegelian reading of the Trinity.  God empties himself into Jesus and is split, de-centered from himself.  And dies.  The God of ‘beyond’ which can and does ground every ideology is emptied and the space of struggle, the Holy Spirit, is opened in this death.  Traditional theology will tend to keep God the Father above and beyond pulling the strings and maintaining order.  It is precisely that God that must be emptied into Jesus die for the purpose of salvation.

Man is eccentric with regard to God, but God himself is eccentric with regard to his own ground, the abyss of Godhead. . . . Christ’s death on the Cross thus means that we should immediately ditch the notion of God as a transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts, the guarantee of historical teleology – Christ’s death on the Cross is the death of this God, it repeats Job’s stance, it refuses any ‘deeper meaning’ that obfuscates the brutal reality of historical catastrophes. – The Monstrosity of Christ

I also recently finished reading Ronald Osborn’s Anarchy and Apocalypse.  This is a relatively conservative appeal to the biblical resources of non-violence set within particular contemporary settings.  However, here the dead God surfaces in the form of post-holocaust Jewish thought, namely that of Elie Wiesel.  Wiesel sees God as the young child hung from his neck, dying and almost dead.  This becomes the straightforward,

ethical as well as a religious imperative: if we are to remain human we must refuse passivity, ease, complacency, and fight for the justice which God, in His captivity, in the time of His banishment, cannot bestow. – Anarchy and Apocalypse

And all the reminded me of an old post I wrote reflecting on Kierkegaard’s test for true love which is to love someone dead.  The dead is the absolute relationship.  If the relationship of love changes it must be because of you, the variable element (no blaming the dead for not understanding you).  To love one dead is love a non-being.

In order properly to test whether or not love is faithful, one eliminates everything whereby the object could in some way aid him in being faithful.  But all this is absent in the relationship to one who is dead, one who is not an actual object.  If love still abides, it is most faithful. – Works of Love

What is going on here?  Will a decade, more or less, pass after which we will look back at these silly caricatures of theology?  Or are these accounts already reflections and indictments of an already over-caricatured and debased theology and ecclesiology?  I would like to call this theme humanist in its apparent rejection of God but that does quite do it justice.  Death is something other than human or perhaps fully human; something that modern humanism (as I have encountered it) does quite seem to grasp.  Also these accounts remain in many ways thoroughly theological.  They are dealing with the dead God not with God as an illusion.  It is this possible realism in theology that I find intriguing and potentially attractive.

And for your listening pleasure he is Gash’s 1986 God is Dead


Digging Into the End

I remember when my little brain first gained the conceptual ability to ponder (outer) space.  I let my mind wander as far as it would go into space.  It traveled deeper and deeper where the star lights began to grow dim.  Then light became absent.  Things slowed down but my mind continued.  Eventually my mind reached a wall, or more accurately a corner, a point where my mind was funneled.  This is the end, there is no further.  But the thought came to me, What if I began to dig into the end?

This thinking always comes back to me when the question of immanence and transcendence surfaces.  It always supported, in my mind, a position of transcendence.  I no longer see this as the case.  I see the question now more as a Hebrew one; that is a question of boundary.  In any  event I have been trying to think through various expressions of immanence lately.  Most of them are loosely or directly connected with Gilles Deleuze (and seems to characterize much of the contributions at AUFS).  Currently I am reading Philip Goodchild’s Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire.  As I am working through many things I do not understand I came across a very helpful and short statement on understanding immanence.

A truly critical philosophy can only be judged by the immanence of its criteria: it must do what it says, and say what it does.  It becomes a being-thought: a thought of being and a being of thought.  The second limit of critical philosophy is therefore a pure plane of immanence; this is the only possible meaning of the ‘end of philosophy’.  Immanence does not mean the absence of determination; rather, it implies that all that one is should be put into how one thinks, so that one’s entire mode of existence may be changed by encounters and idea within thought. [emphasis added]

This is far and away the most helpful thinking I have encountered in this discussion.  I have always approached the question as a jockeying for position over transcendence.  Who is policing the boundaries?  Who is claiming access or insight into the other side?  Who has dug through the end?  Goodchild’s (or Delueze’s) posture orients the question much more existentially and in many ways reminds me of statements found in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground in which the Underground Man attempts to face himself.

There are certain things in a man’s past which he does not divulge to everybody but, perhaps, only to his friends.  Again there are certain things he will not divulge even to his friends; he will divulge them perhaps only to himself, and that, too, as a secret.  But, finally, there are things which he is afraid to divulge even to himself, and every decent man has quite an accumulation of such things in his mind.

. . .

I particularly want to put the whole thing to the test to see whether I can be absolutely frank with myself and not be afraid of the whole truth.

This thinking has no interest in the perception from outside as an abstracted and inaccessible site of conversation.  This thinking desires to put all into play; a venture of risk and trust.  I cannot rely on a secure deposit outside the relations of this world.  What else is kenosis?  As such this becomes a venture that may offer traction to the Christian notion of faith.  And perhaps more importantly this thinking may actually put flesh on the possibility of conversion.

Debt, time, [and the new] wealth

Here is an extended quote from Franco Berardi’s The Soul at Work,

The postmodern domination of capitalism is founded on the refrain of wealth, understood as cumulative possession.  A specific idea of wealth took control of the collective mind which values accumulation and the consent of the postponing of pleasurable enjoyment.  But this idea of wealth (specific to the sad science of economics) transforms life into lack, need and dependence.  To this idea of wealth we need to oppose another idea: wealth as time – time to enjoy, to travel, learn and make love.

Economic submission, producing need and lack, makes our time dependent, transforming our life into a meaningless run towards nothing.  Indebtedness is the basis of this refrain.

In 2006, the book Generation Debt (subtitled: Why now is a terrible time to be young) was published in the United States.  The author, Anya Kamenetz considers a question that finally came to the forefront of our collective attention in 2007, but has been fundamental to capitalism for a long time: debt.

Anya Kamenttz’s analysis refers especially to young people taking out loans in order to study.  For them, debt functions like a symbolic chain whose effects are more powerful than the real metal chains formerly used in slavery.

This new model of subjugation goes through a cycle of capture, illusion, psychological submission, financial trap and finally pure and simple obligation to work.

. . .

Our young fellow signs the loan, goes to university and graduates: after that, his/her life belongs to the bank.  S/he will have to start work immediately after graduation, in order to pay back a never ending amount of money. . . . S/he will have to accept any condition of work, any exploitation, any humiliation, in order to pay the loan which follows her wherever s/he goes.

Debt is the creation of of obsessive refrains that are imposed on the collective mind.  Refrains impose psychological misery thanks to the ghost of wealth, destroying time in order to transform it into economic value.  The aesthetic therapy we need – an aesthetic therapy that will be the politics of the time to come – consists in the creation of dissipating refrains capable of giving light to another modality of wealth, understood as time for pleasure and enjoyment.

The crisis that began in the summer of 2007 has opened a new scene: the very idea of social relation as ‘debt’ is now crumbling apart.

The anti-capitalist movement of the future won’t be a movement of the poor, but of the wealthy.  The real wealthy of the future will be those who will succeed in creating forms of autonomous consumption, mental models of need reduction, habitat models for the sharing of indispensable resources.  This requires the creation of dissipative wealth refrains, or of frugal and ascetic wealth.

in the virtualized model of semiocapitalism, debt worked as a general frame of investment, but it also became a cage for desire, transforming desire into lack, need and dependency that is carried for life.

Finding a way out of such a dependency is a political task whose realization is not a task for politicians.  It’s a task for art, modulating and orienting desire, and mixing libidinal flows.  It is also a task for therapy, understood as a new focalization of attention, and a shifting of the investments of desiring energy.

There is No Oedipal Triangle

I am slowly and awkwardly making my way through Anti-Oedipus.  The process reminds me a little of my first venture through The Brothers Karamazov.  At many points I had the Russian names all jumbled, I had put it down for weeks at a time and then picked up wherever it was that I left off not entirely sure of just what I was entering back into.  It was through that process I came to realize that some books simply needed to be read once so that a basic orientation could be laid for a second reading.  Perhaps this is a lousy and ineffective reading strategy but it has helped sustain my spirit while plodding through books I did not understand (only later to be greatly enlightened by them).  In any event Delueze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus is of a similar but also entirely different order.  I rarely know just what the hell is going on.  There have been, however, enough intersections of clarity that offer themselves as tiny beacons to start charting rough waters.  I recently read one such section.

There is no Oedipal Triangle:  Oedipus is always open in an open social field.  Oedipus opens to the four winds, to the four corners of the social field (not even 3+1, but 4+n).  A poorly closed triangle, a porous or seeping triangle, an exploded triangle from which the flows of desire escape in the direction of other territories.  It is strange that we had to wait for the dreams of colonized peoples in order to see that, on the vertices of the pseudo triangle, mommy was dancing with missionary, daddy was being fucked by the tax collector, while the self was being beaten by the white man.  It is precisely this pairing of the parental figures with agents of another nature, their locking embrace similar to that of wrestlers, that keeps the triangle from closing up again, from being valid in itself, and from claiming to express or represent this different nature of the agents that are in question in the unconscious itself. . . . It could always be said that these extreme situations of war trauma, of colonization, of dire poverty, and so on, are unfavorable to the construction of the Oedipal apparatus – and that it is precisely because of this that these situations favor a psychotic development or explosion – but we have a strong feeling that the problem lies elsewhere.  Apart from the fact that a certain degree of comfort found in the bourgeois family is admittedly necessary to turn out oedipalized subjects, the question of knowing what is actually invested in the comfortable conditions of a supposedly normal or normative Oedipus is pushed still further into the background.

The revolutionary is the first to have the right to say: “Oedipus? Never heard of it.”

Anti-Oedipus, 96.

Introduction to After the Postsecular and Postmodern – Excerpts and Comments

For anyone interested, the editor’s Introduction for After the Postsecular and Postmodern is available at Scibd.  One of the editors and several of the contributors in this volume are regulars at AUFS.  As I started reading through it I thought I would past chunks that stood out or reflected the direction or intent of the volume (I have not yet seen a copy).  I have inserted a few comments, some of which are critical but of course they are then very provisional as I am working from something that points to a whole that I have not seen.  I have tried to keep the comments then on how this piece structures the project.

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Will I Be Invited to the Sound

This Sunday I will be preaching from the book of Jonah.  I am framing Jonah as a parable (nothing new I know) and I thought I would spend some time on the work of parables.  They perform upon us irritating, rubbing, smoothing, caressing.  Jonah eventually reveals the line that was at work upon him, “I know you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.”  This line worked on Jonah to the point where he fled from God due to its implications.

The parabolic line at work in me is often “let those with ears hear.”  This line can almost drive me mad.  I went to fit it into a conceptual epistemology.  What is this line telling me about knowledge?  But it is not concerned with knowledge it is concerned with the ear, with sound, vibrations.  I recently purchased Sufjan Stevens’ Seven Swans.  The first track is All the trees of the field will clap their hands.

If I am alive this time next year
Will I have arrived in time to share?
Mine is about as good this far
I’m still applied to what you are
And I am joining all my thoughts to you
And I’m preparing every part for you

I heard from the trees a great parade
And I heard from the hills a band was made
Will I be invited to the sound?
Will I be a part of what you’ve made?
And I am throwing all my thoughts away
And I’m destroying every bet I’ve made
And I am joining all my thoughts to you
And I’m preparing every part for you

There is an engagement here, a wrestling with the possibility that despite all effort he might not be ‘invited to the sound.’  While I believe there are important expressions of knowledge that are equally available in accessible models of discourse I am troubled that there remains something, perhaps I should not even call this knowledge, that I may well not have access to at this time despite any efforts.

There is a recent trend in certain strands of contemporary theology to explore an out-of-control mode of theology.  This is rooted broadly in the traditions of Yoder and Hauerwas.  In as much as I resonate with these expressions a suspicion lingers that securing and controlling the discourse is rarely escaped.

And I am throwing all my thoughts away
And I’m destroying every bet I’ve made
And I am joining all my thoughts to you

There is at once a discarding and a returning to thought.  A throwing and a joining.

As I said this parabolic language haunts me.  I hope in turn it forms me.  There is something more than knowledge.  Knowledge is the product of structural process.  Knowledge is not bad.  But there is a sound.  Sound is not knowledge.  Sound is action, motion, presence, touch.  I think we have (well I have) yet to learn (or to learn again) what it means to receive.  I think there needs to be maintained not an absolute but a working and living distinction between knowledge on one hand and insight and imagination on the other.  They are of course not exclusive but neither are they identical.

And I’m preparing every part for you

The Immanent Kierkegaard

In his conclusion to Works of Love Kierkegaard introduces the words of beloved apostle,
Beloved, let us love one another
These are words of consummated love that we novices are not yet able to speak. These words are somehow transfigured and blessed. They speak of the old law that is ever-new. We do not speak these words as we cannot leave the school of commandment prematurely but we must become hearers of these words. From here SK begins his final exposition.

Now only one thing more. Remember the Christian like-for-like, the like-for-like of the eternal.

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